Sunday, February 1, 2009

Will I Ever Understand?

Paula's post, Twenty-Three Things This Korean-Adoptee Thought About as a Child, at Heart, Mind and Seoul, is very revealing, emotional and thought-provoking. I could probably spend a lifetime writing a treatise about each one of the twenty-three things, since she's telling us adoptive parents so much about what our kids might be thinking, but wanted to address at least one of them:
8. That my mind understood why my Korean mother had to give me up, but that my heart didn't.

This definitely where Zoe is -- "knowing" the reasons, but struggling with understanding. She's even changed her standard question -- "Why did my birth parents let me go?" She now asks, "Will I ever understand why my birth parents let me go?"

My answer to her has been that it is a very hard thing to understand, that it might become easier to understand as she gets older, but that it's something that grownups have a hard time with, too.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm over 20 years old and my heart still doesn't understand. I don't think it ever "really" will.

Louanne said...

That just makes me tear up a little.